CNNP (Zhong cha) is now managed by COFCO. They used to have 3 segments - black tea, pu erh and green tea. It did not work very well, so they merged it to a single unit. They have apparently gone on a very aggressive campaign to get back the pu erh share that they lost, and have stated that any CNNP teas manufactured and sold before 2010 will not be their responsibility. With their financial clout, they have purchased any leaves in Yunnan that is worth putting into their brands, and most of the better yiwu's were purchased by them. They also have factories and estates owned by them in Yunnan.

The CNNP pu erh toongs are nicely wrapped, almost every toong has 6 bamboo strings tied between each cake.The new teas are a blend of old and new leaves, they are not highly priced.

They want to wrest the #1 position from Taetea, and will do whatever to get to that position, and they have the financial muscle and the CNNP branding.

I have sampled some of their 2012 teas but I have yet to make any CNNP/COFCO purchases. The tea was very drinkable, surprisingly smooth for a 2012.

shah82 wrote:Zhongcha shenanigans as they reentered the puerh market as a real brand in 2006 played a role in the big crash summer/fall of 2007.

shah82, thanks for this information. At that time, do you know if COFCO was already in the play with CNNP? If so, why are they not accepting responsibilities for anything pre 2010?

Many vendors are advising me to steer clear of China Tea, due in part to their quality, lack of manufacturing and processing facilities, inconsistent source of suppliers, etc etc. However, it is not what I experienced after sampling their teas and saw their packaging and their reasonably low pricing.

CNNP brand is too "nationalistic" to die, maybe it will remain mainstream for the locals in future...but then again, maybe not.

I tried some of their teas in Kunming this spring....just....bad. Even some of their benchmark teas, like 7581 (from 2011), which shouldn't be that hard to make - not good at all. So far off from even low end Dayi shu.

They would have a long and arduous uphill battle if they wanted to dethrone Dayi's share of the market.

COFCO bought out Zhongcha. Different management, trying to rhyme what happened before, and probably will fail. It's pretty unlikely the tea would be especially good. One common theme is that tea that's overtly cheap, will always be worth less than what you pay for it. Plenty of good and cheap tea out there, but that's because they're not that good and they are unknown. If it's a well known tea that's also cheap, run, don't walk, away.

MarshalN wrote:Saw an ad recently of Yongnian tea factory - their warehouse had something along the lines of 3 million cakes, by our estimate looking at the pics.

Think when that hits the market the price of tea wouldn't go down a little?

That's interesting. I would be curious to see a study of who is warehousing what and in what quantity.

An influx of lower quality tea could have an impact somewhat akin to what has happened in France. Their low end wines have lose market value because of increase in lower end wines around the world (and a large influx of new producers in other countries) over the last several decades. Their top shelf wines still command a high price, but the bottom fell out of the market.

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